Four days and counting
Just four days to go before I start my month long vacation back home! It has been two years since I saw the welcoming sight of home, and family. A concept that seemed just so foreign a few years ago. What makes it just SO much sweeter is the fact that Rissa will be joining me in India a wee later. We are just so excited at the prospect of meeting my dad and breaking the Great news to him. It is just marvelous. To all who do know the good news, kindly shh, and not post anything in response to this blog entry… Who knows dad might be reading…
We have a full itinerary in India, Rissa and I, and we will try and make the most of our week together, by visiting the monument to love, the Taj, and visit my grandma for a while. Rissa be warned though, my Dashboard Widget tells me that even though it is early March, in Delhi the day temperatures are touching 95-98 F. Eeek! Better get some good SPF ready!
Just ever so excited. What that means for my Blog updates, I cannot say. I usually do blog from my Mac, but since I shall be leaving my desktop behind (and rightly so), I won’t be blogging as much. Of course you can expect Flickr updates so keep tuned to my Flickr channel.
OmniGraffle, what a fantastic piece of software
Consider this a brief, rave review. I am currently creating a document detailing the model behind the IMS LD design editor I coded. The model has to be depicted in a graphics intensive manner, with an emphasis on eye candy. In the past I have used Visio to quickly get a document up and running, but that was on Windows, and though it delivered on functionality, the polish was sorely missing.
Enter Omni Group’s OmniGraffle for OSX. By far one of the best layout proggies out there, OG offers style, polish and a chock load of functionality. I am really stunned to find how easy it is to create beautiful intuitive layouts and diagrams quickly and easily. It really puts Visio to shame. To take one example: want to create a document with multiple callouts to multiple images? No problem, not only does OG allow you to drop shadows, and define "hot" points, you can visualize the distances between the elements and align them intuitively with the hints that show up so unobtrusively on the workspace.
So to conclude, Bravo OG bravo!
IMS LD Editor v. 0.01 is now live!!
The first prototype release of my app is now hosted and live! The Learning Design editor a part of my research thesis will be now evaluated by the team of experts hailing from different representative groups across the Dutch educational setup, on the basis of usability and ability to translate their mental models of education on the basis of the model I have implemented. A few screenshots.
PS: Sorry, the evaluation is by invitation only.
OC’ing my Hackintosh goes awry
After this early morning trial with OC’ing my H, I managed to crash my OS install. It took long hours with different settings to see what setting would actually work. So here it is, the result of my endeavors. Leopard FTW! The best OS I ever shelled out my bux for.
